Event: A Prelude

[trainmasters]

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 8, evening
Where: around

[It's a beautiful evening in the jungle tonight. It's warmer than usual, and some new plants have appeared, black vines that climb up the trees near the Aurora, opening hundreds of tiny white flowers that glow in the darkness. They let of a sweet smell that's soothing like a chamomile tea, and are filled with a dew that, if consumed, leaves characters feeling relaxed and just a little more likely to act on positive impulses.

However, the vines of this plant aren't so harmless. When broken they drip a milky white substance which irritates the skin, leaving red welts that burn and last anywhere from an hour to a full day, depending on how long the substance is in contact. Eating this won't kill you but it'll give you really intense heartburn and nausea for a few hours.

Additionally, if you're walking around in the nearby jungle, you might trip over one of the small cracks that have appeared in the forest floor. Mostly they're not visible underneath the grass and underbrush, but the bigger ones have caused a slight unevenness in the ground that can catch careless toes. There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern or origin to the cracks, nor do they have any other affect on their surroundings. They're just there, suddenly, in a roughly 100-foot radius from the train.

But there's plenty of reason to ignore these natural phenomenon, because there are some new teammates waking up in your carriages! In response to this new wave of arrivals, existing players will hear a cute jingling ringtone come from their Chain. Upon checking, the screen displays... a silly animation of balloons and confetti and the words "WELCOME NEW HEROES", which goes away on its own after a few seconds or when characters tap it. The same display is shown on the big screen in the lounge, in which trays full of colourful drinks have mysteriously appeared. The drinks taste like Kool-Aid and change some part of you the corresponding colour -- pink hair, blue skin, purple eyes, or maybe just a literal green thumb!]

[[OOC NOTE: Newbies can review the arrival scenario on the navigation page if necessary. The drinks in the lounge come in any colour you want, and cause colour shift in whatever and however large an area you want. It could just be a strand of hair or it could be your entire body, whatever you feel like playing with.]]

Comments

[ewestmarch]

Where I'm from, the - practice is, to pull the human soul back out of the afterlife, and bind it back to the body it came from.

[Illustrating with gestures but not making eye contact. She's never had to actually explain this before, most people just ... know.]

After that, it can never return to the Light. You bind it and then suppress the will so that the body is animated but has to obey.

[Adjusts gloves.]

It's illegal because it's... cruel. But if you're already undead, it's the only kind of medicine we respond to, and the six million or so of us that are free need doctors. So that's... what I do.

[This is awkward to explain, and most of it is explained to the air over Eliza's shoulder instead of her face.]

But if you tell people you know necromancy - [sigh] they don't get the right idea.

[bowtiedbones]

There is um, emergency resuscitation for calling a soul back to the body, but that’s only in hospitals. It’s not classed as necromancy either, since you need the body to be capable of living. Like spiritual CPR.

[fidgeting some herself, wringing her hands and tucking her hair behind her ears— picking up on Emilia’s discomfort, and some of her own. but not looking away, deliberately. her unease is with the technicalities of the process at home, not with Emilia herself.]

“Cruel” sounds right... Any raising of a conscious human soul, or even an animal soul with its own memories, would be too traumatic. But we still get people too who don’t know about necromancy, or— If they’re from another world, they think I can do that.

But I don’t. My summoning are callings. What answers is willful and willing, and safe in its host.

[ewestmarch]

That sounds nice.

[almost wistful.]

What do you use them for? Combat?

[bowtiedbones]

Research, mostly. My familiars also support my magic— I can do bigger and more complicated summonings more safely with their help.

[ewestmarch]

I'd like to see them sometime.

[bowtiedbones]

Do you want to meet one right now? I said in that trial, right? I can get one of their ghosts here.

[ewestmarch]

[Emilia cracks a smile.]

Sure. There room for a whole dragon in here?

[bowtiedbones]

He's a ghost, so technically sure, but also he's a small one.

[ewestmarch]

[smol . . . .]

I definitely want to see him.

[bowtiedbones]

He's not going to be too impressive, since my spell for glamors doesn't work, but...

Isildur!

[claps her hands and calls, and without any fanfare a bear-sized shadow suddenly darkens the air behind Eliza]

[ewestmarch]

[Emilia knows it's coming but still twitches - a startle that has her hand going towards the kitchen knife on her hip. There's no conscious thought involved in the motion, and she doesn't actually draw it.]

Oh.

[bowtiedbones]

[Eliza doesn't register the gesture, turning to hug the shadow's heavy spiky head. looking directly at him it's hard to register any detail, just a patch of shadow on the air, but out of the corner of her eye or between blinks— the outlines are sharper, and the shadows are darker. impressions of looming muscle and bony armor, of sharp teeth and powerful claws. this is a dragon built for hunting and chasing prey down on the ground]

Here's my good boy! This is Isildur, he's a dragonwolf.

[ewestmarch]

Can I get closer? [Is that safe?] ... What is a dragonwolf?

[bowtiedbones]

Sure, he won't hurt you.

[really, he seems more preoccupied with headbutting Eliza for attention like a giant needy cat]

Dragonwolf is the common name for this kind of dragon. They were terrestrial pack-hunters, thus "wolves". Oh! He does still have wings though. They're too small for flying, so we think they were probably used for signaling, like how lizards use their dewlaps or how birds show off.

[ewestmarch]

[Emilia immediately steps in and raises a hand to try to pat the shadow, though not quite sure where the shoulder is.]

How many kinds of dragons are there?

[bowtiedbones]

There's tons! I mean, sure, the extant population is largely endangered, but if you look at the full timescale there's dozens of general forms, and then there's of course all the speciation within that! I have four familiars, and they're three wildly different kinds. Isildur and Isolde are my dragon-wolves, and then I have a flowerdrake and a Greater coastal dragon— Lori is the size of a parrot, but Tiberius has a head as a big as a room.

[for a shadow, he's surprisingly solid— a perk of being an undead petting a ghost. it feels not unlike petting an oversized lizard or crocodile, all scales and armored spikes, and his skin is living warm]

[ewestmarch]

Do they fill in all the niches in a given ecosystem, or exist alongside non-dragon animals?

[A long long long time ago, she wanted to be a zoologist.

Then, quiet, to Isildur:] Hello.

[bowtiedbones]

That's a very interesting question, and the answer is actually a little bit of both! Flowerdrakes fill the same niche as small frugivorous parrots, and you'll get some areas where there's birds competing for the same resources, or you'll have just one or the other where the system can't support the both of them. But overall, we do still have other animals! Like, you can have a fisher dragon chasing fish and trying not to get eaten by an alligator, or in another area you could have magical animals coexisting, like with a lesser coastal dragon squabbling with a roc for a nesting site.

[Isildur shakes his head in a greeting, silently rattling almost-invisible spines, and shoves at her hands for attention. hi hi hi!]

[ewestmarch]

[More firm pets for the Large Friend, following the direction of the scales.]

What kind of experiments do you do?

[bowtiedbones]

I focus on summoning extinct species, so a lot of my studies revolve around behavorial observations or locomotion. I also do summonings for other researchers when they want to study something but don't have the necromancy skills themselves.

[ewestmarch]

So if you turned him loose, would he behave like he did in the wild? ... I guess I should ask if this species is domesticated.

[bowtiedbones]

He's not domesticated, but he is my familiar, so he is tame. We unfortunately do have some limits on what we can study about their natural behavior by their attachment to the summoner, the fact that he is a skeleton, and that he's 10000 years removed from his original natural habitat. A lot of the prey he would have hunted doesn't exist anymore either.

[ewestmarch]

[Nod, as she does more pets and scritches.]

That would make things hard. Would it be more effective to work with modern remains?

[bowtiedbones]

[Isildur is totally basking in the attention, leaning heavily into scritches]

Effective how? Isildur's species is extinct, so there's no modern remains to study. It's not an option for me.

[ewestmarch]

Hmh. I misunderstood. ...Are the other two species also extinct?